Salvador Dali
“Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” 1937
Even though you are looking at canonical art, it doesn’t mean you need to like it. Like food, literature, music, fashion—we all develop our own tastes. The thing to remember is that you should try to understand why certain work becomes iconic, and then you can hate it. For instance, I am not a fan of surrealism, but I understand its importance in the story of art and how it emerges when theorists like Freud (remember his Interpetation of Dreams) and Jung gain wider acceptance. It connects to the artist’s psyche but also to developments in psychology that were occuring. It also presents a host of contrasts and uneasy juxtapositions, just like when you had that dream you were in bed with Brad Pitt and your high school gym teacher enters, whistle around her neck, and carrying a hamster….What’s that about? Only you and your therapist can sort that one out, but understanding the role of the unconscious makes it interesting because you can contextualize the art within a broader landscape of developments in science and philosophy.
Now let’s think about abstraction—a very broad topic. You may dislike anything you can’t decipher, but maybe that was the artist’s point—that she/he wanted to disassociate the art from anything readable, or maybe the artist did it because she was expressing a feeling, or a sensation that is abstract to begin with. Then again, she/he could be representing another aspect of the unseen, music, as color (synesthesia) as did Kandinsky. Synesthesia is one sense, hearing, triggering another, sight, which presents sound as color.
Wassily Kandinsky
Composition VII, 1913
Oil on canvas
Then think about it on another level, it could be about form itself: the lines, colors and shapes, as in Mondrian, which dis-connected art from literature, music, religion—which reflect particular cultures, and become about creating a painting in which no viewer had an advantage. It becomes universal, and to some, dangerously utopian in its leveling of all those who experience it. Once you recognize what could be going on, you see the complexity of the work, regardless if you think your child could’ve painted it. These artists disassociated art from any sense of figuration or narration, which can leave some who view it rather lost when searching for understanding, but remember this was what they wanted, something more related to color than to events.
Piet Mondrian
Composition III, 1929
Art is an action. The artist got an idea and thought about how she/he would present that, choosing the medium, size, etc. This sometimes means that you get some pretty strange stuff. I like “Merda d’Artista” (1961) or “Artist’s Shit.” Now you ask yourself, “Is that art?” and “If so, why would anyone can his shit?” Well, look at the top, there’s a signature, so it is associated with a particular producer, in this case Piero Manzoni. Why would Manzoni do this? Well, it is deeply personal and connected to him alone. He is selling his excrement as artwork because, with his signature, it has value: it is a commodity. It has value because he signed it, but its ridiculous and that’s the point. He’s commenting about the commodification of art, about assigning value to the creative product, to the obsession with the artist, his identity, his bodily functions. It’s also makes me think of the Italian Renaissance, and how the biographer, Giorgio Vasari wrote about the lives of the famous artists of the time and from this established the trope of the genius, born to create. Manzoni pokes fun at artistic output, how it is superior simply because it came from a particular human being of celebrity status. I also think about those relics in churches, those grim body parts are on display, so parishoners can worship them. Don’t we worship artists? This work is smart. And think about it. If you open the can to verify its contents, it automatically loses value. I love art that makes you laugh, and there’s not even one dog sitting around a poker table!
“Merda d”Artista,” 1961
Edition of 90
So, art may not present itself as something we recognize as beautiful or sublime, but we need to remember that’s the point. The artist is challenging our long-held notions of what constitutes art, just as Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal, signed by “R. Mutt,” to the Society for Independent Artists in 1917, which was met with shock and awe and ultimately rejected. How could anyone think this was art? Well, it was not crafted by the artist—he just applied a signature from an artist that was fictional—but the signature and his selection of the object make it an artistic act. He was poking fun at the whole aura of the original and how we assign value. These artists make us consider the ones who decide what is art —museums, galleries, curators. . .
R. Mutt (M. Duchamp)
“Fountain,” 1917
The artist saw his work as art, but some contemporaries of Duchamp didn’t. His work was ground-breaking and ushered in Conceptual art that dealt with ideas rather than some evocation of a narrative, or feeling. These are not objects of contemplation the way a Da Vinci is. They were not made by the artist—they are factory made—but the artist applies a signature and the whole dynamic changes because it announces it as a work of art, and hence, of value. In fact, the “Merda d’Artista”, which is from an edition of 90, sold for $281,722 at Christie’s in London in 2015. Manzoni, who died in 1963, would laugh.
The point is, don’t expect to get lost in the artwork because that isn’t what the artist wanted. The artist wants you to think, to be intellectually engaged, throwing it back on us, acknowledging our existence as necessary component in the experience of art. We can thank Duchamp (and others not mentioned here) for helping move art in this direction, an art that asks questions rather than supplying all the answers. That’s great. We all need to think more critically about what we see and what it means, rather than expecting that all the answers are contained within the work. We help supply the answers, but don’t expect to completely resolve the issues the artist raises because iconic art nags us to keep searching for new perspectives, a process that is dynamic, and open-ended.
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